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“I have a user on site that has over 20gig in a CSC folder in windows”

In a Windows 7 Administration course today, I was telling this story, which my fellow students thought was hilarious. Back in early 2007, this email forwarded along to me for attention:

RE: Fw: Attn: Issues with the New Windows XP image

Guys,

I have a user on site that has over 20gig in a CSC folder in windows the folder appears to be hidden and has weird permissions on it most machines this folder is small but this machine it has gone out of control, What is that folder for? c:\windows\CSC

If I can hear from someone ASAP that would be great

Fred

The customer leapt to the conclusion that because a company called “CSC” was doing the desktop deployment for him, we’d have nothing better to do then drop 20 gigabytes worth of files onto a random PC.

My reply, remembering that I was dealing with an customer who we were deploying 1600 copies of Windows XP to, was:

What are all these files in my C:\WINDOWS\CSC directory? This is where Windows keeps the files that you have marked for being available offline. (CSC was the working name for the feature now called Offline Files. It stands for Client-Side Caching.)

I still read The Old New Thing daily, and also still tell people that Google is their friend.